A summer shower had cooled London, making the city glisten in the sunshine. Grey clouds cleared, and beams of light shone on the dome of Saint Paul’s cathedral, the spires of Westminster Abbey, the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf, and the iron span of Tower Bridge. The Thames River snaked beneath the myriad of bridges that spanned it, and the bright day made its mud-brown waters sparkle. Below the streets of the metropolis stretched the cylindrical tunnels of the ‘Tube,’ London’s underground railroad.
At the Tube’s Embankment Station, a government official got off a silver train, and, minding the gap, stepped onto the platform. As she moved toward the station’s exit, the official came upon someone reading a newspaper. Next to the pudgy fingers that clasped the front page, she saw a picture of the Prince in full military dress and a headline that declared: PRINCE ALBERT IN AFGHANISTAN. She gasped and hurried to her Whitehall office.
Within the soot-covered Ministry of Defence building, she burst into the minister’s office.
“Have you seen today’s paper?” she asked the minister.
“Yes, yes. Damnit, yes,” he grumbled back.
“Al-Qaeda and the Taliban will get word.”
“I know, I know. It’s time to bring Prince Albert home. Make it so,” the minister ordered.
“Yes, sir,” the official sighed. She would have a long day of phone calls ahead, though she would have Prince Albert safely home within a week. She got to work.
The minster leaned over his desk. He would request a cup of tea later, but in the meantime, he thumbed through the day’s dispatches.
On top of the pile of papers, the first report stated that a UK-based petroleum company had made a significant discovery of light oil in the resource-rich seabed that surrounded the Falkland Islands.
“You do not look well,” King Edward said to his oldest son. Even though Albert sat, arrayed in full military dress and seated within the splendor of Buckingham Palace’s blue drawing room, he knew the comment was likely true. Since the incident at Jugroom, Albert had been drinking heavily. He and Donnan started indulging just after the battle, just as soon as they landed at Camp Bastion. Their first victim was a bottle of single malt whiskey Donnan had kept in his foot locker. After the golden elixir was gone, it was downhill like a wheel of cheese for them both, as they dispensed with Russian vodka, Indian gin, and even a cube of black hash.
Donnan had punched the Special Air Service bloke who tried to slow them down, and got a broken arm for his mistake. When flight orders came in, Albert claimed to be sick, and an American doctor who had come to examine him took one whiff of the fumes that emanated from his pores, he shook his head, and signed the medical release. By then, all of Camp Bastion — as well as all of Afghanistan for that matter — knew about the Prince’s presence. With the news, half the Brits on base had tried to leave gifts of delicacies and liquors at Albert’s private barracks, though the SAS contingent never let anyone get too close to what the whole camp had previously believed to be just an air conditioned supply shed.
“Thank you, Your Majesty,” Albert finally acknowledged the King’s statement.
At the moment, Albert hated his father only slightly more than he hated himself. Despite the red and gold carpet, and the portraits of ancestors whose heavy judgmental gaze fell upon him, Albert wanted to spit on the floor. He swallowed hard, instead. He closed his eyes to fight off a headache that felt like a creature moving within the folds of his brain. In the pink darkness behind his lids, Albert saw the missile hit the Talibani SUV. He had seen this image — dreamt about it — every night. In the vision, the little girl emerged from the fire, bloodied and charred, and asked Albert what she had done to make him so mad.
Among the room’s fine art was a globe made in 1750. Albert remembered playing with it as a child, spinning it, and when it stopped turning, he would look to see what exotic locale had ended up under his thumb. Regardless of the place, he would always say to his older brother: “Perhaps we will go there someday.” Upon it, he saw the Durrani Empire — present-day Afghanistan. In the late eighteenth century, its borders had stretched into Iran, as well as modern-day India and Pakistan.
“When we are in private, you may address me as, ‘Father,’” the King said.
“Yes, Your Majesty.” Albert’s reply was distant and monotone.
King Edward huffed with frustration. His first born son, Henry, had been killed during a stag hunt at the Royal Hunting Reserve at Balmoral Castle. It had been the King who found his son’s body with a hole in his chest, slumped over a rock by the River Dee. At his son’s feet was the dropped and discharged rifle, a lick of blue smoke wafting from its bore.
Albert had always been the King’s afterthought, second place to Henry’s accomplishments and talents. Now he was heir to all the empire and kingdom. Although he always loved Albert, the King felt let down by his younger boy. After all, a King’s progeny should not exhibit the frailties of other common folk; he must be hard, strong, and adhere to a timeless preordained model. When Albert’s musings of art and literature had replaced business, hunting, and warfare as preferred loves, the King concluded that he and Albert were not cut from the same jib. A butting of heads and stubborn wills consumed their relationship ever since. The boy had decided his path, and the King found every flaw as an excuse to stab at the heart of the one he was meant to nurture. What the King would never know, never realize, is that he too had become just like his own father.
Once, King Edward had had his own spark of desire within; a desire to live his own life and walk his own path. This spark had been readily snuffed. The once young Prince Edward had longed for the embrace and acceptance of his own father. However, he had been pushed away, frozen cold by pretense and appearances, forever corrupted with a centuries-old attitude that had broken many a royal son.
Even when in the same room, Albert and his father might as well have been a million miles apart. Although his father knew nothing of the incident at Jugroom Fort, Albert’s return home — simply a matter of security — was viewed by King Edward as a failure of sorts, a retreat; a defeat on the field of battle.
The King did not see the medals on his son’s chest, the badge of the army air corps, nor his pilot’s insignia, or the blood on his hands. He saw only that his son had been forced home. Albert’s warm, dark, brown eyes — the eyes of his mother — looked deep into the blue eyes of his father, the Germanic eyes inherited from the royal bloodline of Europe. Looking into the cold pools, Albert realized his father would have preferred him to come home in a flag-draped coffin, preferred it to his running from a cadre of sheep-herding rifle-toting peasants. At that moment, Albert also realized that his father would have preferred it, had he been the one to die that day by the River Dee.
Albert was about to say it was not his choice to return from Afghanistan. However, like many explanations before, Albert knew his words would be futile, would float in the still air of the palace’s grandeur, and echo softly among the frescos and ornate ceilings before fading to silence. He adjusted his tight collar.
The scratchy confines of Albert’s uniform became a symbol of his bondage; bondage to a life for which he did not ask, a life he would trade for nearly any other. In that moment, Albert wished he could see his mother once more. He wanted to be a little boy again, held in her comforting arms, crying over the injustices that kept a free spirit bound, the hell of a life that sucked animus until one was a beaten shell of the child that once was, a zombie that shambled through day-to-day tortures with a forced smile painted on wrinkled skin. Albert felt the worst of the human condition: hopelessness. However, such feelings ran counter to all he had been taught as an Englishman — stiff upper-lip and all — Albert wanted to embrace this hopelessness. He wanted to run, to fly, to hide at the ends of the Earth. He wanted to trade places with that little girl. He wanted to be dead.